


Summer Thief and Winter Guards-Captain

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Series: Nwalin Week 2015 [1]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Female Dwalin, Female Nori (Tolkien), Nwalin Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 04:01:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3922126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Prompt 1: Ered Luin<br/>The first of my Nwalin Week 2015 pieces, set in a very similar universe to A King and Her Damosels.<br/>In other words, the entire Company are ladies (excluding Bombur and Gloin).</p>
<p>Azanulbizar is not long past, and Dwalin is having trouble sleeping. <br/>Nori can't sleep either, and watches over the Captain of the Guard with interest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Thief and Winter Guards-Captain

**Author's Note:**

> Haha wow. I have no idea what I am doing. I hear people either really love or really hate this pairing, but it's already a side pairing in the other genderbender story so what the hey.
> 
> Important to know:  
> Idun is Balin and Dwalin's mom; it's pretty easy to figure out from context I think, but there you go.  
> Also I'm not sure if I'll use her in this story or not, but I've named Mama 'Ri Sigrun.

There are nights where Dwalin wakes up gasping sharply for air, her thick fingers grasping for something – a weapon, a shield, her father’s arm – and there is _nothing there_. So she gnashes her teeth and breathes deeply through her crooked nose and curls tighter around herself as if she were a dwarfling again.

_It makes Dwalin catch her breath, to see Balin alive. But when the elder child of Fundin offers only a broken smile and a shake of the head, Dwalin’s world crumbles around her._

_She stumbles after her sister to the place where Fundin lies, face splattered with black gore, eyes unseeing. Balin quickly closes them, trembling, apologizing for not having thought to do that previously. Her voice is distant and murky below the roaring in Dwalin’s ears. She drops to her knees._

_Suddenly, the pieces of her life no longer fit together. Suddenly everything is torn asunder. Fundin her father, the rock of their family, is cold and pale and still. His breastplate is several feet from him, caved in like tin struck by a mallet. Dwalin’s vision swims, and she can no longer count the number of Orkish blades piercing her father’s body._

And then Idun comes in and brushes a hand across her youngest daughter’s inked scalp, every time, though Dwalin swears she hasn’t – _hasn’t_ – made a sound.

“Oh, my beautiful treasure,” Idun will say softly, and Dwalin can feel her heart crack open each time.

It helps and it hurts. How her mother, her beautiful strong mother, can still be so kind, for all that Dwalin has failed her. How Idun can still call her daughter beautiful and beloved, who was never beautiful and deserves no love.

_A high, dizzy voice at the back of her mind cries out in disbelief. Another, thick and choked, wonders how they’ll manage to tell Idun her Bull is dead._

_A bellow like a wounded animal tears from Dwalin’s bloodied lips. Somehow she finds herself on her feet, forehead pressed to Balin’s as they sob their grief together, standing atop the hundreds of bodies that they can’t escape, that they can’t walk far enough not to desecrate._

“I’m sorry,” Dwalin will try to say, but Idun will hear none of it.

“You lived. You’re alive, and you’re home,” she tells her daughter, pressing a kiss to her scalp, to her sweaty palm, knocking their heads gently together.

Then Balin walks in with a glass of something soothing and hot in her gloved hands, and she joins Idun in coddling the baby of the family until Dwalin can feel her legs again and leaves to pace the night. In the morning, Dwalin’s cheeks will rush red at needing this, but in the darkness there is nothing shameful about the terror of being alone, or the safe haven of a mother’s arms.

In truth, it is through her mother’s touch and her sister’s tired-but-mithril-strong smiles and the rumbling stone of Ered Luin that is home even though it will never match the glorious ringing song of Erebor, which keeps the fissure at Dwalin’s core from cracking her in two.

 

There are nights where Nori does not sleep. The scar – twisting, ugly – across her belly still stings like a fresh wound and everything she does or thinks or feels is _wrong_. So she skirts away from home and perches unnaturally on an outcrop of rock or a sturdy rooftop, pressing her knees to her chest.

_“If you ever try to steal from me again, you’ll know worse than that.”_

_Tossed onto the street from a roof like so much garbage after her hopes had crossed the sky like ravens, like eagles. She had thought – well, that was the problem. She tries to smirk but it turns into a grimace of pain, she was never cut out for this._

_“You’re no Great Thief. You’re just a petty pickpocket. I don’t know why—”_

And then she sees the captain of King-Thorin-II-Oakenshield-the-Oh-So-Magnanimous’ guard, her big shoulders hunched, fingers visibly trembling even from so far away. Blowing hot puffs of air into the night like she’s smoking a pipe, only she’s not.

And Nori leans in, like she’s listening, and Nori finds herself slinking across roofs to follow Fundin’s youngest with her scar itching and pain still playing in the back of her skull.

_They’ve got her by the collar, sagging, like Ori’s little ragdoll. A punch to the nose that flashes; diamonds in moonlight or the sun across the sea._

_“—we ever took you along. Botched the job like a child. Pathetic.”_

_She doesn’t flinch at a second hit to the same place because they don’t deserve that and Nori can be hard as the stone of the mountain._

_Heists were never for her, she knows that now, is shamed but has learned. She is not some great thief. Just a pickpocket, just a rat, just a something-or-other, a second daughter from a second father. Somehow she knows the scar won’t heal away. Fine. Nori never makes the same mistake twice._

She knows that Dwalin is not on patrol. Nori is too careful about Dwalin’s schedule to be caught unawares. She’s a pickpocket, a ne’er-do-well, a something-or-other, but she’s not a fool. Nori presses the flat of her palm to the scar beneath her tunic and does not flinch. Better to know your strengths, and no one is stronger than the daughter of Fundin – the Bull of Ered Luin.

That’s what the Guard Captain’s fellows call her, eyes shining in admiration, past the blackened bruises when she has laid them flat in yet another too-easy courtship duel. The Bull, like her father before her.

But Nori has another name for Dwalin, a name only she can give.

From a fair-weather thief, a Summer Thief, a coward who only shows her face when Fundin’s youngest is not on patrol, comes the epithet Winter Guards-Captain, to her opposite in every way.

 

On the nights when Dwalin paces the streets, she can feel eyes on her. The eyes of the mountain, she hopes, and not of Dwarrows, but that is unlikely. The feeling of that gaze is strong and curious and etching a mark into her. Intense. But the stone beneath her feet is still merry, it is not afraid.

She is safe. Or as safe as anyone can be.

And to try and think of anything but battle, Dwalin wonders at the existence of a thief she has never seen. The Summer Thief, they call her. She’s “that freckled ginger one, with the peaked hair and the evil smile” but Dwalin has never seen any of that. Only heard, and it’s annoying enough to keep her mind steady and not drunkenly wheeling on grander failures.

A thief afraid of Dwalin so that they never cross paths, but with the kind of audacity to name her. Dwalin loves and hates her more common epithet; that she is a Bull like Fundin before her – because it’s true, because she is here and he is not and everything is wrong with that. But she doesn’t know what to make of Winter Guards-Captain. It’s utterly meaningless, just a backwards reflection of the thief. She doesn’t know why it makes her cheeks flush hot as if she’s being mocked.

But thieves do not make sense, that’s all.

 

Nori is silent and it’s only half skill. The mountain knows her, and she it, and that is why it softens her footfalls. The stone is as curious of Dwalin as she is, and it’s not too hard to see why. This hulking Dwarf with her muscular arms and her shorn-bald head and eyes like silver-steel. And yet, she reddens under her sister’s teasing, ruffles the feathers of King Thorin herself, and marches like she knows everyone’s in awe of her. A Dwarf with countless challenges to courtship duels, who has never been defeated. A noble and a barbarian at once.

She knows of Dwalin, but Nori is not so foolish as to think that means she knows her.

And no thief, no ne’er-do-well, would have enough right to ask for a courting duel. It’s a joke. A stupid wish. Lust for something beautiful, the commonest trait for a thief, that’s all.

 

There are nights where Dwalin knows she is being followed, and yet somehow – inexplicably – feels safe, feels the tension of spinning guilt trickle out of her shoulders; nights where Nori longs to step onto the road and offer a hand and say “I am the Summer Thief,” but smiles a twisting smile and does nothing at all.


End file.
